“What if, one by one, African countries each received a phone call (agreed upon by all their major donors – the World Bank, Western countries, etc.) telling them that in exactly five years the aid taps would shut off – permanently?”
Depending on your view of the aid industry, this is probably the most ingenious idea you have ever come across or the most naive, if not downright irresponsible.
For those of us who live in Africa and grew up in this neck of the woods; as a way of making money apart from the formal employment in which we are engaged, as a “side hustle” we keep chickens in the back yard.
By any chance do we ever hope that as we feed the chickens, one day they will be independent to feed themselves?
We feed them so that we can feed on them. So its true of most aid which often come with donor strings attached.
What Dr. Dambisa attempts to tell us theoretically is that aid is a tool of subjugation and it is the fundamental cause of poverty, and getting rid of aid will make way for economic miracles, in ailing African countries.
In all honesty she’s partly right; he who pays the piper eventually gets to call more than just the tunes.
Unfortunately, the book falls short of the promised land the title promises. I didn’t find her broad-brush observations and arguments about the devastating effects of aid very helpful or informative.
Dead Aid’s reductionist diagnosis of Africa’s development shortcomings repeatedly confuses correlation with causality. With zero hard evidence to back up the numerous claims.
While it is silly to believe aid is the panacea to the growth challenges in African countries.
It is completely illogical to blame everything on the presence of aid in developing countries and even more ludicrous to believe developing countries can achieve anything if they only ‘believe in themselves’ and just try hard enough, as Hollywood movies love to tell us.
The book is sporadic, selective in its use of facts, sloppy, simplistic and illogical.
Ms. Moyo presents a number of logical fallacies about aid that do not hold up to scrutiny, from hasty generalizations to non causa procausa.
For instance, it doesn’t take cat whiskers to figure out that one expects “poor nations” to correlate with reduced domestic savings.
And in so far as foreign aid is prevalent in poor countries, the issue of correlation between higher aid and low domestic savings, is absolutely meaningless.
If we are to use her logic, you could argue that hospitals cause diseases because you always find sick people around/in hospitals.
Its true NGOs & BINGO’s operating among villagers spend much of their time promoting community businesses which are aimed at finding unique niches within the world market, without any analysis of the pitfalls of neoliberal capitalism.
It’s also true aid dependency is the one string that ties most developing countries together but it is equally disingenuous not to point out the fact that the greater the devastation caused by neoliberal policies, through big-bang market liberalization, the greater the outbreak of the NGO epidemic.
Meanwhile those behind such policies – the conservatives, industrialists, bankers, and the unholy trinity of IMF, WTO & WB -can welcome the role of NGOs in providing cheap welfare, which will not be too much of a tax burden on the fabulously rich in an African society.
Dambisa dedicates an entire chapter exalting the Chinese modus operandi as the holy grail to economic nirvana on the continent.
For someone championing economic independence, i found that quite odd.
You can’t fight a lion and blow the noses of your children at the same time. This is no different from injecting our proverbial backyard chicken with rapid growth hormones.
A book minted from the great minds of a Zambian born economist, i honestly expected a more nuanced critic of the aid industry; grounded solutions that reflected the Afrocentric reality on the ground, not a regurgitation of “zombie” doctrine solutions.
She needed to explain how a poor, aid educated person in Siera Leone, Malawi or Uganda on aid subsidized anti-retroviral drugs manages to magic themselves out of poverty in a system that is only interested in extracting their labor at the cheapest possible price.
Or better yet explain to readers how the local anti-malaria mosquito net manufacturer in Tanzania she talks about is supposed to compete with a deep pocketed competitor from another country, in an era of ‘free trade’.
Moyo’s ideological solutions which one is made to feel is a one size fits all are not groundbreaking, to the say the least.
Her counter arguments of turning off the taps and tapping the international bond markets, micro-finance loans are nothing short of the wet dreams of neo-liberal private sector innovation, whose efficacy has been highly questionable.
Moyo’s attempt to defend ‘free trade’ in an era when free trade has become toxic not only to Africa, but also to the rest of the world; by intentionally cherry picking evidence to back up her grandiose claims, points to an intellectual dishonesty of the highest order.
The problem i believe is that Dambisa Moyo worked at Goldman Sachs, WB, and her ideological solutions are similarly neoliberal. Atleast she knows which side of her bread is buttered.
Dr. Moyo chooses to through the baby out with the bath water, by cutting the “taps” instead of critiquing the delivery mechanism of aid industry and its all out “bro-mance” with neoliberalism.
And probably a focus on heterodox policy alternatives that can heal the neo-liberal devastation of the last 30 years might have been a more genuine mouth piece for those whose very survival has now been condemned to keeping the taps open.
But expecting an economist to inquire into their fundamentalist economic doctrine is about as futile as hoping an Al Qaeda shoe bomber would inquire into their fundamentalist religious doctrine.
As a colleague put it “Dead Aid” is a “Dead End” for rigor and reason, I was left wanting a lot more Ha-Joon Chang and a lot less Moyo.
https://amarragroup.wordpress.com/2019/04/11/dead-aid/
amarragroup.com 